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If you’re looking for a powerful marketing strategy that’s easy to do, look no further than personalization. Tailoring your messaging to individuals makes you very appealing to customers.

Here are three ways to do it.

First, personalize every communication. For example, go beyond using first names in email messages. Use the demographic information you have to offer specials or programs based on their individual information, like location or age.

Next, use social media to actually socialize. Don’t think of social media as a sales channel. Engage your customers and potential clients online through conversation, sharing and just being in touch. Nothing is more personal than receiving a direct response from a company. Talk to your audience about their concerns. Ask how you can help them achieve their goals. Solicit feedback about your products and services. This is a great way to interact one-on-one with people.

Finally, encourage your customers to use your app. If someone has your app on their phone, it’s important to them – or they wouldn’t have taken the time to download it. But people are busy, so it’s smart to re-engage those who may have abandoned the app. Send an email reminder to customers who haven’t used the app recently. Include a pop-up within the app that displays updates and new content. Use their first name and keep it casual, so you’re like a friend rather than a corporation.

Personalizing your messaging will help you engage with your audience – and turn them into a devoted fan base.

Is your business lost in a crowded marketplace? You may be overlooking something that could differentiate your business from all those other competitors: YOU. Personal branding can be a powerful marketing strategy for small businesses, allowing an entrepreneur to capitalize on personal expertise and know-how to attract customers.

Personal branding shouldn’t be the sole growth strategy for your business. But it fills a unique niche in an overall marketing plan, particularly if you have an aptitude for connecting with people via social media. The first step: get a social presence. Launch a Facebook page. Build a LinkedIn profile. Learn how to talk Twitter-style. But keep this in mind, cultivating a personal brand should never turn into a self-aggrandizing “look at how great I am” sales pitch. Also remember to aim for consistency in your online branding and your printed materials.

Personal branding should not consist of an effort to emulate those marketing campaigns crafted by large companies. Although Madison Avenue-style marketing attracts lots of social media followers, it lacks a personal connection that’s so important to cultivating a local, trusted persona.

So how do you stand apart from the crowd? Build a personal brand with a commitment to humility. (This is why we didn’t use a superhero for our photo.) Start with an attitude that readily acknowledges you are not a self-made success story. There are and were many people in your life who contributed to your business and helped your enterprise grow. Remember the neighboring businessman who gave you that first big break by referring you to a business-oriented network? And don’t forget about the customer who took the time to share the story of the excellent customer-service you provided in a time of need.

The next step is to envision what kind of brand best fits you. What effect do you typically have on others? Is it a calming influence or are you a live wire who crackles with energy when you enter a room full of people? Do you see yourself as a hero, or a humble servant? Remember your personal brand should be built upon your authentic self. Never try to foster a brand that is counter to your basic nature.

Above all, let others see your personal brand as you interact in your community, through high-quality printed materials, fun swag and consistent branding through all of your promotional collateral. Have fun with it, get out of your comfort zone and be willing to play up the part — zany, caring or flashy — as opportunity knocks. And definitely share your personal brand through social media channels. If you’ve always been one with a great sense of humor, you’ll find your personal brand may catch on like wildfire among your followers.

Have you ever heard of the concept of split testing? Sometimes it’s called “A/B testing. Either way, the idea is simple: you take two versions of a marketing element and test them both to see which one performs better. This powerful technique has been used for decades in traditional, offline marketing. In the virtual world, it’s even more effective — because it’s so easy and fast to see how your two options are working. And it can be as simple as ABC. Here’s how:

A great way to use A/B testing is for testing your headlines and titles. Did you know that most people, when following the news, don’t read past the headline? To find a blog title or email subject line or social media post that’ll always draw people in, you’ve got to test them. Tracking the variations post-publishing will give you indisputable evidence of which version is doing the best. That’s the one you use going forward.

Because Facebook ads are a relatively inexpensive form of advertising, you might be tempted to throw up ads haphazardly. But don’t do it. Don’t let even a single dollar go to waste. Facebook makes split testing your ads super easy, and you can really refine each test. Try creating two versions of the same ad — first with different headlines and then with different images. The resulting best performing ad will be a sure winner.

Creating trackable links is another way to do your A/B testing. This works on most social media platforms. Create a custom URL for each variation you’re trying out. With free services like Bit.ly, you can create a shortened link with a customized name so you know which version is getting the most clicks. Make it easy to tell which is which by adding “A” and “B” or something similar to the names. This makes it simple to determine which posts are the strongest.

The bottom line is that adding A/B testing does more than confirm your digital marketing decisions. It also gives you valuable insight into your audience’s mind — which benefits your offline marketing efforts, too!

Editing photos for social media posts can be fun and empowering or a total time-sucking drag, depending on how good you already are at it and how much you enjoy it compared to other social media marketing tasks competing for your attention.

If you’re newer to photo editing and want to avoid some of the most common mistakes brands make on social media — especially Instagram, which offers users a ton of filtering and editing options — here are some things you should avoid doing at all costs:

Relying too much on pre-set filters

When some marketers are first starting out, they tend to use the pre-set filters to save time and effort of figuring out how to fully edit the photos themselves. Unfortunately, it’s blatantly obvious to many users when a brand hasn’t put much effort into optimizing their photos to look their best, and it can drive people away from your channels if your content doesn’t look outstanding compared to your competitors.

Yes, this will take more time and the learning curve is certainly steeper, but ignore those pre-set filters and edit your photos yourself (on social media or with Photoshop) for best results.

Excessive Saturation

The saturation feature lets you adjust the color density of a photo. You can remove most of the colors or send the saturation into overdrive, neither of which produces eye-catching imagery for social media posts. If you must have a black and white photo, then a pre-set filter might help you here. On the other end of the saturation spectrum, you don’t want any people in the photo looking as though they have bright orange skin, so take care to lightly boost the saturation without making them look cartoonish.

Vignette Overkill

Some brands seem to think vignette — darkened corners around an image — make their photos look edgier, but doing this too often or too excessively can hamper the attractiveness of the original image. Occasionally darken the corners of your photo when you think it is necessary but avoid doing this on all of your posts.

Troubles with Text in Images

On Facebook, any photo ads with more than 20% text will most likely get rejected (based on how much text fills up squares in a grid). Even if you don’t have much text in a photo, it still can be unappealing for your audience if the photo falls into any of these traps:

• Text color is too similar to the color in the photo
• Text style doesn’t match the “vibe” of the image (think Century Gothic Bold for a cheerful beach theme)
• Text doesn’t seamlessly blend with the photo, making it look awkward and out of place

Portrait Mode Gone Wrong

A final mistake you want to avoid in social media photos is using portrait mode when there’s no reason to or focusing on the wrong face/person/animal/object. If you’re a fashion company promoting a new shoe line, then a portrait mode photo centered on your model’s face will blur out the product you’re trying to promote. As simple as this advice sounds, plenty of brands make this mistake when they don’t put enough care and thought into what exactly they’re trying to promote with a particular image.

We’re all familiar with the influence digital communications have in the marketing and advertising world. Say “digital” and what age group comes to mind?

If you’re like most people, you’d envision a young adult or teen wearing AirPods and Snapchatting with their friends.

You might want to revise that picture. Aging Today Online reveals that the big news in digital devices is their adoption by seniors. People aged 50 and up are the biggest adopters of digital technology.

Older Americans, just like their ancestors, will experience a gradual loss of visual acuity. That’s why merchants from small companies to gargantuan firms alike will migrate to high-resolution digital displays. It’s simple logic that businesses will take a strong interest in technology that will help seniors take in those marketing pitches.

Digital screens of all sizes already deliver impressive displays. The sea-change will be in the rate of adoption of these devices, because a lot of Americans have visual issues and the number of affected individuals will only increase. Increasing visual acuity in digital displays is a timely solution for changing demographics. Considering all this, it’s little surprise that one of largest sectors of the tablet market belongs to seniors. With larger displays and the ability change font sizes when reading, these devices have brought new life to an older generation ever since the introduction of the Apple iPad in 2010. And while many younger consumers are opting for bigger smartphones, seniors are happy to keep separate devices, often using a no-frills flip phone for calls and tablets for media consumption.

Even as the global phone market has slowed in recent year, all these factors add up to what promises to be a golden age for digital-display devices.